“Rabia” in the cinema – Mareike Engelhardt: “Radicalization often takes place in intimate areas”

With “Rabia” you have chosen a very difficult topic. Jessica (later Rabia) joins IS with a friend. This is surprisingly complex for a first novel.

As a director you have the choice: either you tell a personal experience or the experience of others in which your own story has an echo. In doing so, you take on a form of political responsibility that I consciously chose with »Rabia«. I couldn’t understand how thousands of young people were leaving our democracies to join ISIS in Syria. How could our countries allow these young people, often minors, to travel to a country at war? The youngest was 14! How these women become perpetrators through a chain of events is the central question of the film.

Jessica and her friend don’t have much history. You see them briefly at work as geriatric nurses and at home, then they fly to Syria. Why do you present the cinema audience with a fait accompli?

We know a lot about the men who went to Syria, but there is no film that shows what awaited the women there. So on the one hand I wanted to focus on this blank space, but on the other hand I didn’t want to fall into the trap of giving too simple an answer. Because the motivation for this radical step that Jessica and her friend took varied greatly from woman to woman. And incredibly diverse! It would be reductive to break this down to one reason. Unfortunately, such shortcuts are often taken in film, which trivializes reality. Often it is chains of traumatic experiences that lead these women to decide to join such a murderous ideology, which for them often represents an escape from an existence from which they suffer. Basically, it’s neither about religion nor about political utopia, but about complex psychological processes that women only understand later or never. I therefore decided to avoid clear answers in the film and instead work with scattered clues.

Interview

Starhaus

Mareike Engelhardt was born in Berlin in 1983. After studying comparative literature, art history and psychology in Berlin, London and Paris, she began filming dancers in the New York underground. At the same time, she made her first short films and learned the craft as an assistant director with Katell Quillévéré, Patricia Mazuy, Roman Polanski and Volker Schlöndorff. After a screenwriting course at the famous French film school La Fémis, she developed her first feature film “Rabia – The Lost Dream”.

There is no political or religious education taking place in your film. Did you have the feeling that women were in a similar situation back then?

Yes! I wanted to stay very close to the experiences of these women and give the viewer the same experience. These women, who came from over a hundred different countries, went to Syria like colonialists – often with almost no knowledge of the country, the language or the Koran. In the name of a God of whom they knew next to nothing, they drove out the Syrian residents, moved into the most beautiful houses in the city and helped their men implement the terror regime there. When Syrians heard German or French on the street, they immediately thought of terrorists – just as some here think of terrorists when they hear Arabic on the street. We feel the need to declare the other person a monster for our safety because of their strangeness. The fact is that these monsters were our children, cousins, neighbors and were formed through hatred and fear. The more insecure, unhappy and fearful people are, the more powerful and attractive totalitarian thought systems become. They exploit this fear and turn people into fighting machines.

Nevertheless, this new phase of life in the film is initially positively charged. The women giggle and talk about future husbands as if they were on a school trip. That seems strange.

The women’s stark euphoria upon arrival in Syria is a shocking contrast to the horror of the war and their decision to support it. IS had developed a highly professional recruitment system to radicalize young women, mostly via social networks. For many, it was their first trip on an airplane – even with their friends! This was more exciting than any school trip. What’s more, the Hijra – this journey to the Holy Land – guaranteed them direct access to paradise. In their WhatsApp groups they were celebrated like queens; on site, as in any cult-like structure, they were celebrated as new family members and received recognition, attention and love.

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In the film, Jessica refuses the wedding and gets into a power struggle with the director of the house, the so-called black widow, who invented the Madafas system. She wants to raise the girls to be perfect wives. Jessica becomes “Rabia” and undergoes an unexpected development. Why is this happening?

Radicalization often takes place in an intimate setting through a certain authority figure who exploits the psychological vulnerabilities of their counterpart. In the film I try to show how one becomes a perpetrator. Many of these women were victims of sexual violence, and for me their relationship to their own bodies is a key to understanding their own perpetration of violence. When someone’s body is taken away early on, or the power and control over one’s own body is taken away, it is a well-known mechanism to resubjugate that body to a husband or a powerful woman. The trauma already experienced is reproduced. This time, however, renewed submission brings with it the ability to exercise violence. This feels like justified revenge for your own suffering and can therefore be justified to yourself.

“Rabia – The Lost Dream”: France, Germany, Belgium 2024. Director: Mareike Engelhardt, book: Mareike Engelhardt, Samuel Doux. With: Megan Northam, Lubna Azabal, Natacha Krief, Klara Wördemann, Maria Wördemann, Lena Lauzemis, Andranic Manet, Lena Urzendowsky. 94 min. Cinema release January 23rd.